Chapter Eight of Social Media and Strategic Communication: Audience Segmentation

Chapter eight of “Social Media and Strategic Communication” was all about audience segmentation and analysis. A simple way of putting it, social media is not meant to reach every person who uses it, but to focus on individual audiences. This is done by understanding their needs, expectations, services, relationships, products, etc. It is very common for a social media account to focus on a specific location or interest rather than a broad topic.

Audience segmentation is the process of categorizing people into specific groups based on different factors. These factors include demographics, characteristics, populations and more. The reason audience segmentation is so important in today’s social media is because this is how companies and businesses sell to an audience. Audience segmentation allows them to reach a certain group that will be most interested in conducting business.

Understand a target audience can be tricky but luckily we know have demographics and psychographics to make things easier for us. Demographics is population statistics such as age and gender, while psychographics are opinions, attitudes and interests. These help content creators understand the type of content to create in order to reach their audience effectively.

A big part of all this is understand the two types of audience that we want to reach. First we have a primary audience. This audience is made of individuals whom is your first priority to reach, this is where most of your energy goes into. Next, we have the secondary audience which are people like your primary audience but are less of a priority.